My name is Rob Smith and I am a 30-year-old patrol agent with the United States Border Patrol. My mission, as part of the uniformed enforcement arm of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, is to maintain control of the international boundaries between the ports of entry, by detecting and preventing the smuggling and unlawful entry of aliens and narcotics into the United States. I work in the San Diego Sector and I'm assigned as a line agent in Campo, Calif.
       Campo is a very small community nestled in the mountains of Southern California, roughly 40 miles east of San Diego. Until recently, it was a quiet community supporting mostly ranchers. It has a convenience/grocery store, one restaurant, a church, and no stoplights. In fact, if you were to drive through Campo during the day, you might see children playing, men on horseback checking fences, and an occasional all-terrain vehicle. It would probably resemble any other rural community you might be familiar with. When the sun sets, however, the area becomes infested with a nuisance of enormous proportions. I am referring specifically to the massive influx of illegal immigrants and drug smugglers. It hasn't always been this way. It wasn't until the San Diego Sector of the United States Border Patrol initiated Operation Gatekeeper in 1994 that the traffic shifted to the Campo area. Operation Gatekeeper, for those of you who aren't familiar with it, is the strategy developed by Sector Chief Johnny Williams to gain control of the nation's busiest illegal-immigration area. It was designed to place agents in high-profile positions to act as a "show of force." Would-be illegal border-crossers see these agents and are discouraged from crossing because of the high probability of apprehension. This initiative started at the coastline and has slowly moved east to the Campo area. Because of the initial lack of border-patrol agents in the area and over 40 miles of border to patrol, Campo became known as a smuggler's paradise. The smugglers began to traverse this mountain community on a routine basis. Many of the local residents became irate. Large groups of illegal aliens would tear down fences, help themselves to gardens and water hoses, and discard enormous heaps of trash on private and public property. Citizens were desperate for a solution to this problem. The U.S. Border Patrol responded.
       Chief Williams sent in the cavalry. Campo Station became the focus of the San Diego Sector and with that, received much-needed personnel, equipment, and a new game plan to curb this ever increasing influx of illegal aliens and narcotics traffic. Without risking operational security, I will attempt to explain the way the Campo Station operates.
       Campo Station has been reduced to approximately 25 miles of border. It is divided into four zones with definite geographical boundaries. Agents are assigned to a zone on a daily basis. Within each zone, one agent (usually the most senior) is assigned as the officer-in-charge. He has responsibility for shifting assets and personnel within his zone, as necessary, to reinforce areas that are being overrun and to cover gaps that may develop in coverage. Within each zone, there is a series of dirt roads that run east and west paralleling the border, and north-south access roads to get to these consecutive east-west roads. There are also sensors placed along certain trails that detect both pedestrian and vehicular traffic. If an agent is assigned an operational role, he will have one of two possible duties: primary cut and drag, or primary response. The primary cut-and-drag units are responsible for patrolling their assigned zone with the specific purpose of "signcutting" [looking for footprints or other traces of passage] groups that cross the border road, and checking sensors. When they find a group across, they park their vehicles and "push" the traffic (i.e., follow their tracks) to let the response units know where the traffic is headed. The response units then get in front of the traffic, and in effect, sandwich them in, cutting off their routes to the north and south. This causes confusion for the smuggler. The group will "lay up" (stop) so that the smuggler can try to find a way around the response units. This allows the agents who are "pushing the sign" the chance to catch up with and eventually apprehend the illegal border-crossers. In addition, the primary-response units have responsibility for cutting secondary roads to find traffic that might have gotten through. This is called a defense in depth.
       If an agent is not assigned to an operational role, he will be assigned to an operational-support role. Once a group is caught, an agent assigned to transport duties will pick up the group and transport them to the station for processing. When they arrive at the station, two to three more agents will do the processing, screening, and removal paperwork required by the INS to properly remove them from the country. Other operational support roles include: operation of the infrared (heat-seeking) night scopes to visually track groups crossing under the cover of darkness; high-point operations used during the hours of daylight and darkness to act as a visual deterrent to discourage groups from crossing; and checkpoint operations.
       If a group happens to get through our first line of defense, their ultimate goal is to get into a heavily populated area with a transportation network. If they accomplish this, it is much easier to get into the interior of the United States, where they are less likely to be apprehended. Therefore, we put traffic checkpoints on roads leading into and out of these major border cities. This affords us the opportunity to check traffic for loads of illegal aliens or narcotics, and because the drivers have to spend time planning routes around these checkpoints, it gives us more time to track the groups that may have got around our first-line defenses.
       This is, in effect, the way we are curbing the onslaught of illegal smuggling operations in the Campo area. Now that you have an idea of the different types of jobs we are assigned to on a daily basis, I will take you through the jobs that I am assigned, to give you an in-depth look into how your U.S. Border Patrol is doing in the anti-smuggling war.